Global 360 Marketing Itself

With two BPM acquisitions still fresh in most people's memories Global 360 is pushing its growth in BPM revenue very hard. The Dallas-based ISV, which began life as a roll-up primarily of document imaging vendors, including Eastman Software, Kofile, Keyfile, ViewStar, and Identitech, recently reported a 49% growth in software in BPM software licenses for its first quarter, year-over-year. Recently announced AnyDoc partner Appian  announced 59% growth for its 2009 fiscal year. So the BPM market is hot.

 Also, at the end of 2009-beginning of 2010, two significant BPM acquisitions were announced -  IBM's buy of Lombardi and Progress Software buying Savvion. Speculation has been that Microsoft may acquire Global 360, which would likely be a happy day for Global 360's investors, based on the some of the multiple's floating around the BPM market. Global's recent partnership with KnolwedgeLake does nothing to dampen that speculation.

Bottom line is that BPM is a curious space to be in, with both ECM and capture vendors seeming to gravitate toward it. The longtime theory has always been, it's not capturing content and putting in a repository that is important - it's what you do with that captured and stored content - meaning it's how you automate the process that brings the ROI, and this is where BPM comes into play. FileNet realized this almost from the outset of its business and many other imaging vendors followed suit. I guess it's about time the content management and capture people made the same discovery.